ABSTRACT
This chapter tells about an uncommonly bright, congenial, curious, and adaptable man whose people, the Kanuri; original name, Mohammed Ali ben Said; and references to Allah indicate his African Muslim beginnings. He did not forget the land and the religion of his fathers, as his autobiography shows, but by the time Said arrived in the New World in I860, he had wandered so far and witnessed so much as both a slave and a freeman that his origins and religion were the oldest parts of his extraordinarily extensive multicultural baggage. The story of Mohammed Ali ben Said, or Nicholas Said, as he called himself after a problematic baptism in Russia, is by any standard an unusual one.
